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Hubble's images often look like works of art
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But as we discovered in episode 59, the nuts and bolts of astronomers' work
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with Hubble is often not so visual.
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Spectra — the graphs of the distribution of colours within an observation —
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are a powerful tool for studying the Universe.
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But because they don't look visually arresting,
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it's usually just the scientists who see them.
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Episode 63: From the distant past — Hubble and art
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To astronomers, spectra have an elegance that equals Hubble’s prettiest pictures.
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They might not be as attractive as pictures of galaxies or nebulae,
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but for astronomer Bob Fosbury
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and conceptual artist Tim Otto Roth,
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they can still be works of art.
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I’m always thinking about ways of explaining what scientists actually do
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and how they come up with these really rather profound facts about the Universe.
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And the tools we use are of course very sophisticated,
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and they sometimes produce data which are not
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very visually appealing, attractive or understandable.
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And so, one of the main tools that astronomers use and have used for many, many years is spectroscopy
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The spectra themselves are full of information to somebody like me, an astronomer,
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but that information is not obvious to the viewer.
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Roth and Fosbury have worked to build a work of art
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about the oldest colours in the Universe, using Hubble’s spectra of distant galaxies.
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Using a green laser, Roth’s installation projects Hubble spectra of distant galaxies and quasars as an animated light wave.
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It’s been exhibited in a number of cities in Europe and the USA
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including its premiere here in Venice in 2010...
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… and more recently on the dome of the Hayden Planetarium here in New York.
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But why would an artist be interested in projecting spectra?
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I think people are attracted in a way by the projection.
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They see, well, they have anthropomorphic associations
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They probably see a brainwave, or a heartbeat,
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so people stop and get interested in that, and that’s important.
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And they’re puzzled, and they start to reflect: “Well, what’s going on there?”
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As a conceptual artist, Roth is interested in the concept of colour;
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how it is reproduced, and how it is represented.
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In the past, he has worked with CCDs — the type of chip that detects light in Hubble —
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and has used individual coloured pixels taken from astronomical observations.
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This work of art goes a step further:
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the projection is in just a single shade of green,
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but the peaks and troughs in the lines
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represent thousands of colours observed in thousands of the most distant objects ever observed by science.
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Would you be able to go into the signs there and interpret what it actually means?
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You could. You’re seeing basically a randomly selected 1200 objects
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so I wouldn’t be able to say off by heart which one you’re looking at
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But by and large, if you put a couple of astronomers here like myself
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in a few minutes they would be discussing,
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“Yes, that’s H-alpha, that’s hydrogen, that’s nitrogen, I can see the wavelength”.
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Yeah, I’m learning!
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Every position has a corresponding element.
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Well, it’s important, I think, for the art to reflect concepts like colour and the image
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This is what art has done for the last 500 years
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We had movements also in the 20th century
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we have concept art, we have colour field paintings,
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and in a way, 'From the Distant Past' brings this together,
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reflecting the concept of colour with a very conceptual formal approach.
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What you see here is the heartbeat of the primordial Universe
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This is very early colour information; it’s the oldest colour information we have,
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it’s the oldest light information we have, travelling for billions of years across the Universe.
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and it tells us of the origins of the Universe.
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Well, I think the interaction between the art and the science is very interesting,
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and it’s something I’m learning about,
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but I think the art has a way of accessing the profound idea
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I mean, the science is a way of exploring the profound idea
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making the observations, making the deductions, painting the picture of the way the Universe works.
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I think, for me, the art adds a very valid channel from this scientific work
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to present the profound idea in a way that has impact to people
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And it’s a way of doing it where you don’t have to explain all the intricate detail of what is actually being done
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You can say, “Hey, what you’re seeing was captured by a telescope in orbit,
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from photons which had left galaxies in the very early Universe and then have been detected
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So you’re looking at the very distant Universe as it was happening all of those billions of years ago".
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Special thanks
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Venues
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Hubblecast is produced by ESA/Hubble at the European Southern Observatory in Germany
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The Hubble mission is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency
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www.spacetelescope.org
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Transcribed by ESA/Hubble. Translation ––